Monthly Archives: July 2007

conflict of interest from yesterday, Biased BBC reader ‘Al the Hat’ coments:

A few weeks ago, Radio 5 Live had an extensive discussion on who should replace Michael Vaughan as captain of the England one day cricket team.

Guest and former England cricketer Alec Stewart made a long and considered argument in favour of Paul Collingwood, without feeling the need to tell us that he is, in fact, Collingwood’s agent.

If this is so, I wonder if this is something the BBC was aware of at the time of the interview? If so, someone at the BBC needs to be re-educated, again, about the apparently confusing difference between right and wrong. If not, then the contributor in question should be blacklisted from appearing anywhere on the BBC for a lengthy period to discourage such abuses.

There seems to be a good deal of plugging of one product or another across the BBC, most noticeably on programmes like Breakfast, ever desperate to fill up those vacuous hours, with plugs for books, plays, shows, gadgets (Apple products especially!), etc. I doubt that many of these are sought out by programme researchers.

I wonder just how often this sort of product placement happens for friends of BBC staff or with the help of former BBC staff turned PR flaks – probably a lot more often than we’d like to think would happen with an honest and impartial broadcaster. But then we are talking about the media luvvies who ‘own’ the BBC.

Don’t forget the slogan from a year or two back: It’s not your BBC, it’s their BBC! At least I think that’s how it went.

On Saturday Anonanon commented:

On this morning’s Breakfast “writer and broadcaster” Simon Fanshawe used his post-7am newspaper review to make overtly pro-Labour, anti-SNP and anti-Tory comments. When Iain Dale does the papers for the BBC his Tory party affiliation is mentioned without fail, but Fanshawe’s Labour activism is ignored. In fact, when it comes to declaring his interests Fanshawe seems to have been granted immunity by his long-time employer [the BBC]. Recently he presented an episode of the BBC’s Building Britain in which he praised a controversial new skyscraper development in Brighton; the fact that his PR firm represents the developers was not brought to the attention of viewers.

…which reminded me of this report in Private Eye, 06JUL2007:

Simon Fanshawe, who presented the opening programme of BBC1’s new Building Britainseries two weeks ago, was lavish in his praise for three new skyscrapers that will be erected in Brighton.

One of them was the controversial 40-storey tower that will be the centrepiece of the new marina development. His gushing praise was only matched by his derision for fuddy-duddy conservationists who wnat to preserve the views from all those outdated Regency terraces.

The programme was a public relations coup for Brunswick Developments, the company behind the new marina development. And Brunswick’s PR firm, Midnight Communications will be equally pleased. As indeed will the man who chairs Midnight Communications… Simon Fanshawe!

Why neither he nor the BBC saw fit to mention this vested interest is something the corporation’s trustees might wish to pursue.

If this allegation is true then both Fanshawe and the BBC owe the residents of Brighton and every other tellytaxpayer an explanation for such a monstrous abuse of our supposedly ‘impartial’ tellytaxpayer funded state broadcaster.

And yet it seems from Anonanon’s comment that self-publicist Fanshawe remains welcome across the BBC’s threshold as a paid talking-head. How can this be? Have these people never heard of ethics or morality, let alone impartiality and honesty?

this afternoon about a BBC News Twenty-Bore reporter asking:

“What have you got to say about reports that people are selling bottled water AT A PROFIT from the side of the road?”

Which is of course shocking – shocking that the Beeboids should make such an assumption – how are they to know what the costs are of providing bottled-water at the side of the road? Perhaps those selling bottled water at the side of the road are merely covering their own costs without making a profit.

And even if they were, are they any worse than Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda etc. who have the cheek to charge for bottled water too? Or does the BBC expect people who manufacture and distribute bottled water (even at handy road-side locations!) to do so free of charge?

If so, as Tom points out, why are all those Beeboids being paid (and in many cases being paid handsome overtime) to cover the flood story? Is that not profit on their part? Or are they providing their services for free?

It’s time that the BBC realised just how much damage they have done to the UK over very many years, decades even, with their natural, knee-jerk presumption and presentation of words such as ‘profit’, ‘private’ and ‘privatisation’ as if they were swear words.

P.S. What’s the difference between a flooding catastrophe and a flooding nightmare? They’re the same, but in the nightmare you have crabbit-faced Caroline Hawley & co. sticking their noses into your misery, and pocketing a decent wedge of tellytax cash for doing so!

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

reports that BBC apologises in row over ‘mistake’ in SNP survey:

THE BBC has suffered another credibility blow after admitting that it made up a Newsnight survey suggesting that most of Britain and Scotland’s leading businesses were not in favour of independence.

Presenter Jeremy Paxman had told SNP leader Alex Salmond that ‘not one’ of 50 firms, made up of 25 in Britain and 25 north of the border, supported the party’s independence policy on a TV special shown before the Holyrood elections in May.

The Sunday Herald has discovered the BBC has since apologised after a viewer complained the ‘straw poll’ was mis-represented by Paxman because only a handful of companies replied to the survey.
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Details of the latest mistake emerged only days after a number of corporation staff were told to ‘step back’ from their duties over their involvement in a fake phone-in scandal affecting six programmes, including BBC Scotland’s Children In Need Appeal.

The BBC’s head of editorial complaints, Fraser Steel, responding to the complaint by viewer Chris Hegarty conceded that only seven of the 50 firms approached for their views on independence had replied.

He added that contrary to Paxman’s claims, a majority had declined to express a view ‘one way or the other, two had declared ‘neutrality’ and one leading business said ‘it didn’t care.’ Steel added that as a result of the mistake, the programme’s editor and ‘senior management’ were spoken to about ‘the importance of clarity and transparency’ when reporting the outcome of so-called ‘snapshots’ and straw polls.

Quite a bit of a ‘mistake’. These sorts of ring-round snap-polls are wide open to abuse, with questions framed, participants selected and results interpreted, to support the story that the broadcaster wants to tell or believes to be true, if the producers of the program are less than scrupulous in their methods and approach.

Another popular news trick that is also wide open to abuse are so-called vox-pop pieces where two or three ‘random’ people are interviewed in the street. These vox-pops never state how many people were approached (to then have two or three selected from them), but worse than that, they are cut down to sound-bite size, giving more scope for ‘editorial creativeness’ and they very often don’t state the names of those interviewed, so it is impossible to know whether or not the people interviewed are activists with their own agenda or even if they really are randomly selected.

We really need to get back to a state of affairs where we can trust the news – where we are given just the straight facts, without any editorialising or dumbed-down presentational pap – away from the Fiona Bruce and Natasha Kaplinsky style presentation that characterise so much BBC news, and back to the style and substance of the likes of Richard Baker, Kenneth Kendall and Angela Rippon.

Thanks to commenters Richy & Max and fellow blogger Mr. Eugenides for the link.

from end to end, echoing so much of what we have said and discussed here for so long. Particular highlights of his article, BBC in need, sub-headed “Poor old Auntie Beeb is unwell. She’s confused and no longer knows right from wrong, truth from fakery”, include:

Management surprise at management ignorance:

Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.

“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me, “shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale.”

Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward?

“Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has to be done.”

The contradictions between quality, populism and the compulsory tellytax:

Either way, all those I spoke to believe the BBC needs a change of culture, that it needs to decide what it is there for and why we should continue to pay for its existence, compulsorily and on pain of imprisonment if we don’t fork out.

“Why are we doing these phone-in polls?” said the executive board member. “In what possible sense are they public service broadcasting?

How the BBC’s sheer dominance affects and controls every broadcaster:

According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time.

“It was lurking under the surface,” he says, “but there were more and more people coming to my company literally bursting into tears and saying, ‘I don’t want to do this to people any more’. But they wouldn’t go public because they were worried they’d never get another job.”

More on the contradictions of the tellytax:

A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. “The BBC has to stop trying to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs, it’s inevitable what will happen.” AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC doesn’t get into the gutter it may lose its raison d’être anyway. For the past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles – universality and public service – and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it increasingly difficult to do so.

The awful waste of an awful lot of cash on the awful Jonathan Woss:

“The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for ‘only’ £18m when he had asked for £24m,” the senior BBC journalist remarked with some derision. “He draws only about 3m viewers every week – for which he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?”

Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost the BBC “a couple of hundred million quid” when it came to charter renewal because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could be so cavalier with licence-payers’ money.

Others argue that the BBC should not compete with commercial organisations because the BBC is simply inept at doing so, and they use the Ross contract as a case in point.

For the executive board member it’s a more straightforward calculation. “If there’s a commercial organisation that wants to pay Jonathan Ross £18m and thinks it can draw an audience that justifies the salary, then let them do it. It’s not for the BBC. Exactly the same applies to phone-in polls.”

The buck being passed to a quivering RDF scapegoat:

WHAT should be done? The BBC provided an easy sacrificial victim by “suspending” all commissions from RDF, the independent production company which supplied the original shots of Her Majesty. But the firm says that they e-mailed the BBC three times asking to see its edit before transmission. Someone in the BBC jumped to the conclusion that their trail showed the Queen storming out. At no time did they ask RDF whether this actually happened.

Self-serving institutionalised producers who just know they are serving the public whatever they do:

“You know, whenever I ask them about some new programme or channel they’re planning,” the executive board member told me, laughing, “they always tell me that it is core broadcasting. And I say to them, ‘Right, okay, well give me an example of something the BBC does which is peripheral broadcasting’. They can’t come up with an answer.”

Do read the rest – it’s a longer column than usual, and has a section of additional reporting by Dipesh Gadher, including these examples of recent BBC trouble:

The Treasury has complained about a recent Newsnight report in which scenes were manipulated to make it appear as if Gordon Brown’s press officer was deliberately picking on a reporter.

All seems to have gone quiet on this issue, covered at length here at Biased BBC. Has anyone seen or heard an answer yet to the question of just why was the order of the footage manipulated in the first place, if, as Newsnight maintains, it had no effect on the story?

This weekend the BBC revealed that it had misled viewers in a wildlife documentary called Incredible Animal Journeys broadcast in May. The programme claimed to show Steve Leonard, the presenter, tracking the migration of a pregnant caribou via a GPS receiver from a hotel room in the Yukon. In fact, the scenes were “reconstructed” several weeks later in the UK.

The broadcaster was only rumbled after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a British electrical socket in the background.

I remember this program, and another one or two supposedly tracking migrating animals, and thought at the time that the tracking they were purporting to do seemed infeasible, both technologically and in style. Now we know – it was just the BBC faking it, again.

focuses on three interesting environmental topics, including this extract concerning the BBC’s misleading coverage:

A feature of the row over the BBC’s rigging of competitions has been the rush to protest that this is trivial compared with the much greater scandal of the BBC’s generally biased world-view on a whole range of topics, giving almost everything it broadcasts a distorting spin.

It is not always easy to pin this down to hard, indisputable facts, but one small, telling example consistently demonstrates just how one-sided its coverage has become.For some years, in all the BBC’s promotion of the benefits of wind power, it has always concealed one central flaw. This is the fact that turbines are a highly inefficient and unreliable energy source because wind only blows on average for a quarter of the time.

The BBC betrays its systematic bias on this by invariably referring to the output of wind turbines only in terms of their “installed capacity”, as if their blades were constantly spinning at maximum efficiency,

Last week, for instance, the BBC reported on three turbines, nearly 400ft high, being installed at the port of Bristol. These, it told us, will produce “all the electricity needed to run the port”, while saving 15,000 tons of CO2 every year.

There was no mention of the fact that three quarters of the time the port will have to draw its power from conventional power stations, kept running to step in when the wind drops (let alone that those 15,000 tons of “CO2 savings” equate to 3 per cent of the yearly emissions of one jumbo jet).

Another tireless promoter of the wind scam is Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC’s environmental correspondent, who recently reported on the Government’s energy White Paper standing in front of the 36-turbine Gallow Rig windfarm in Dumfriesshire, which she excitably claimed produces “enough power for around 18,000 homes”.

In fact, thanks to the Renewable Energy Foundation’s website, we can now see exactly how much (or how little) energy is produced by every turbine in the land. This shows that claims such as this exaggerated Gallow Rig’s output by about 400 per cent.

Because this sort of telltale error is so persistent in the BBC’s coverage of wind power, perhaps it is time for the corporation to tell us exactly what it is up to.

Do read the rest – it’s all interesting stuff.

Thank you to commenter Max for the link.

Despite reports in our local newspaper, Scotland hasn’t yet become independent.

One of those who wish that we were independent is Mike Russell MSP. I’ve met Mr Russell once or twice and think that he’s one of the good guys: he doesn’t believe that everything should be done by the state, an opinion that’s far from universal in Scotland.

Earlier in the year Mike took part in a BBC programme about the Union. He wasn’t entirely happy with Britain’s “national” broadcaster:

Yet even so, the whole thing was undoubtedly skewed in favour of the status quo. The choice of non-speaking guests depended heavily on the Scottish establishment who are far from representative of Scottish opinion.

But Mike doesn’t come down too hard on the Beeb:

Those problems can be put down to ignorance , and moreover an ignorance that is excusable , even if one would expect that by now the BBC would be aware of such pitfalls and take steps to overcome them (for example by drafting in to any London based production in Scotland some Scottish broadcasting advisers.)

So, if the bias isn’t deliberate, what is really going on here? Here’s Mike’s answer:

Knowing many journalists and broadcasters as I do, however, I think that it is an institutional bias that is at fault. The BBC as a corporate body is part of the British establishment and its thinking is based on the continuation of that establishment as it is. The organisaton simply cannot envisage the validity of other choices, and consequently its actions are dictated by that intellectual blind spot.

Precisely. And that’s exactly why the state shouldn’t be involved in broadcasting any more than it should be running newspapers.

So will all be hunky-dory when Scotland is independent and that Icelandic building really is an embassy? Not necessarily. Here’s Mike again:

I have also made it clear that my own experience as a programme maker left me in no doubt that the BBC was – at one stage – the best and most creative broadcasting institution in the world. Taking its programme making values and enshrining them in a newly energised Scottish Broadcasting Company, which could access the best of British and world output but present it and add to it from our perspective has long been a cherished policy aim of the SNP and remains so

Now I agree entirely that the Scottish license fee payer gets a raw deal from the BBC. Scottish broadcasting output is way below our contribution to the “national” kitty. But that’s par for the course in centralised Britain. The question is, though, should we expect a Scottish state broadcaster to be any different? Indeed, a broadcaster with only 5 million home customers might well be even more in thrall to its own local establishment than is the Beeb. And an independent social democratic Scotland certainly would have its own establishment that wouldn’t be representative of Scottishopinion.

Mike writes this:

And the real jewel in the crown – the guaranteed impartial, honest and high quality broadcasting service on which we should rely, and for which we are each as citizens prepared to pay – becomes tarnished , brittle and then broken.

But the BBC’s not “impartial”, is it? There is no guarantee. Why should we expect a Scottish state broadcaster to be any different? I’m certainly not “prepared” to pay for one voluntarily. If Mike really wants Scotland to be an example to other countries why doesn’t he campaign for a totally free market in broadcasting? Let’s have a hundred Scottish Broadcasting Companies.

. He has discovered that:

Five senior BBC production staff were suspended yesterday as Britain’s most senior policeman raised the prospect of a criminal investigation into the corporation’s rigging of phone-in competitions.

The staff, all senior producers or editors, were the first casualties of the row over viewer deceptions involving a series of flagship charity and children’s shows.

A fraud inquiry now seems inevitable after Mark Pritchard, the Tory MP for The Wrekin, wrote to Scotland Yard to demand action.

“Please could you confirm that the Metropolitan Police will fully investigate allegations that a very serious fraud has taken place within the BBC,” he wrote. “These financial irregularities are a serious matter and should be treated as such – not least because the BBC is a public corporation, funded by taxpayers.”

However, it seems there is disquiet among the ranks:

But there was growing anger among some BBC employees that Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, who showed to journalists an incorrectly edited trailer of the Queen apparently walking out from a photo session, is still at work.

And of course we have the obligatory ‘senior BBC insider’ to spin things for Peter Fincham:

One senior BBC insider last night predicted Mr Fincham was safe. “Peter was given a trailer which he assumed was edited properly. His mistake was not being more vigilant.”

So that’s alright then – no harm done! Carry on Fincham!

Andrew Pierce also reports that the Commons culture committee has ordered Mark Byford, the deputy director-general of the BBC, Caroline Thomson, the chief operating officer of the BBC, and Michael Grade, the former chairman of the BBC to give evidence next Tuesday at a televised hearing into the crisis. Should be fun!